Labour’s Lil’Elves, aided and abetted by the self-satisfied members of their intelligentsia (or so they must see themselves, why else would they make such smug comments?) had a bit of a field day with the Nationalists’ re-jigging of the Thatcher-era poster, the one that had already been paid homage in the States.
Precisely why, apart from the fact that English is clearly not their first language and they just didn’t get it, the Lil’Smuglets were preening so much isn’t exactly clear. The message on the PN’s billboard was quite simple, starkly so: Labour Won’t Work. It doesn’t mean that you or I won’t work under Labour, because much to the eventual consternation of those who would love us to starve, we will, it just means that Labour won’t work for Malta, they are no solution.
Labour missed completely, in their juvenile haste to poke fun at the billboard that its message was, to use political-pr jargon, precisely “on message”: the people who get that billboard are the ones from whom Labour are getting support at the moment, the middle-aged, the ones who identify with Thatcher and her ideals and the ones who will worry no end about the spectre of Real Labour being invoked.
That’s the problem, of course, when you run your party with a juvenile mentality, when you try to be hip, cool and down with the youths. They’ve lost the youth of the country already, probably because they can see through the emptiness of Labour’s wish-lists and don’t have the accumulated baggage that pre-disposes them against the PN. Now they’re working on losing the middle-aged, the ones who know what Labour was and who have, at least thus far, convinced themselves that Labour is no longer what it was, even if the evidence is completely against this thesis.
Yep, folks, that’s the message indeed: Labour Won’t Work and no amount of badly-executed, platitude-laden Google Hangouts will change it, for all the hip and trendy catch-phrases, in English, that Joseph Muscat chucks into the mix. That’s if you can understand a word he says, of course.